Last Memorial Day a sheriff and deputies in Orange County broke into a two million dollar home to find the very badly decomposed bodies of a family of five. They'd been dead for a long time.
This family had achieved the American ideal of security. They lived in a wealthy gated community where none of those dangerous poor people could get in. They owned handguns in case all their security systems were breached.
Their security system was so perfect in fact that their deaths were undiscovered for weeks. They had isolated themselves so effectively, from the dangers of the scary world created by the media, that no one knew they were gone.
They would have been just as safe if they were pygmies living in the deepest jungle ten thousand years ago. At least someone would have known they were in danger, and might have intervened to stop it.
The American Nervous Nellie solution -- more guns, more protection, more isolation, more walls -- is self-defeating. Our police departments don't have time to deal with real crime because they're so busy answering false alarms when a household pet triggers some rich person's security system. City dwellers have trouble sleeping at night because kids love to amuse themselves by bumping all the parked cars and setting off their car alarms. Children are taught to be so terrified of anyone they don't know that when a woman in our town kindly stopped to help a small boy who had been injured in a bike accident, he screamed that a stranger was coming to molest him. People have been known to pack up and move when a sex offender was discovered to be living within fifty miles of their home. This despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of molestations are committed by relatives of the victim.
At the national level, the security obsession has similar consequences. Americans have allowed themselves to fall hook, line, and sinker for the fear-mongering of the administration and its media--even scrapping our Bill of Rights. Our nation is hiding behind its borders like some phobia-crazed obsessive who refuses to breathe for fear of inhaling a germ.
Because we've made it impossible now for Iraqi college students to safely attend college in Iraq, the Iraqi Student Project is trying to get a few students into the United States to complete their education. This is a lengthy process, involving extended routing through the bureaucratic labyrinth of Homeland Security, and even then, coordinator Jane Pitz finds herself besieged by Nervous Nellies asking her if she isn't afraid terrorists will get into the country.
Sometimes I think the whole nation needs to put Valium in its water supply.
Thanks Philip for bringing this conspicuous problem of Americans living in irrational fear to light. Hopefully some people recognize the symptoms and alter their behavior.
The American people need to wake up to all this nonsense. No one is safe and for the Bushies and the media to keep us under our pillows with fear is ludicrous.